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David Bowie’s Scary Monsters and, now that I was more experienced in orgasm control, have normal teenage sex. She gave me so many hickeys that at one point my neck was too sore to even move. But I didn’t mind, since I was able to wear them like badges of honor at school. She also swallowed, which gave me more bragging rights. One day she brought me a blue glitter bow tie that looked like something a Chippendale would wear. I think she wanted to try role-playing, but the only role-playing I was familiar with was Dungeons & Dragons.
    After a solid week of fucking, Louise stopped returning my calls. I was worried I had gotten her pregnant, because I hadn’t used a condom every time. I had this image of her mother sending her away to a convent and putting her—our—child up for adoption. Or maybe Louise was going to make me pay child support for the rest of my life. There was also the possibility that she’d gotten an abortion, something had gone wrong, she had died, and now her parents wanted to murder me. After I hadn’t heard from her for several weeks, I decided to call her one more time, disguising my voice with a cloth over the telephone in case her parents answered.
    Fortunately, she picked up the phone.
    “I’m sorry I haven’t called you in so long,” she apologized. “I’ve been sick.”
    “What kind of sick?” I panicked. “You don’t have a fever, do you? Are you throwing up in the morning or anything like that?”
    It turned out that she was simply avoiding me because she was a slut and having a boyfriend would ruin her reputation. Those weren’t her words exactly, but that was basically what she meant.
    A few days later during math class, my balls started itching. It continued all day, spreading throughout my pubic hair. When I returned home, I went straight to the bathroom, dropped my pants and stood on the sink to examine myself. I instantly spotted three or four black scabs directly above my dick. I picked one off, and as I was looking at it, a little blood bubbled out.
    I still thought it was a piece of dead skin, but when I held it up closer to the light, I noticed that it had legs—and they were moving. I screamed in shock and disgust. Then I smashed it into the sink, but it didn’t splatter like I thought it would. It crunched like a little shellfish. Not knowing any better, I brought it to my mother and asked her what it was.
    “Oh, well, you’ve got lice,” she sighed good-naturedly. “You probably picked it up from the tanning bed.”
    As shameful as this is to admit, I was going for indoor tans regularly at the time. I had a terrible complexion—my face was literally swollen with acne—and the dermatologist told me there was a new type of tanning bed that would dry out my skin and help my social life.
    My mother was clearly in denial that her young son had been fucking girls and getting crabs. Even my father, who always promised that the day I got laid we were going to celebrate with a bottle of champagne he had tucked away while working at Kmart, didn’t really want to admit it. This was mainly because ever since I had discovered tits in junior high, he had been wanting to take me to a prostitute to lose my virginity. So I just played along with the tanning bed story.
    My mother bought me medicine for body lice, but in the privacy of my bathroom I shaved off all my pubic hair and took care of the crabs myself. (At the time, shaving off body hair was still unusual to me.)
    As far as I know, I’ve never had another venereal disease since then. And, to the best of my knowledge, my parents still think I’m a virgin.
    CHARMING THE WORM
    John Crowell and I stood on top of the hill in front of his house, taking turns swigging out of a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 that we had conned an older kid into buying for us. We had been there for at least an hour, getting wasted and gazing out at the sleepy farmland around us, at the sky bruised and swollen with the threat of rain, and at the